iberian river
by leaky.oven
Summary: They need not wade through the murky pull of your origins, for you are a river whose course was already carved before you by indifferent waters. [slash, tw for dubcon and incest]


_A hastily filled prompt from the k!meme that I decided_  
_needed to be put here instead, because LOOK I CAN _  
_STILL WORD AT THINGS ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT. _

_TW for dubcon, incest. I tried to treat the notion with_  
_the gravity it deserves, instead of 'lol brothers totally_  
_getting it on'. Because my name is Destructo, ruiner_  
_of fun, they who is absolutely the crappest at parties._

* * *

A passion lurked behind the swing of the boy's sword that spake more of his time spent on the farm than it did his time in the army. He boasted little of his experience at Ostagar, regardless, shame clear in the flush up his thick jaw to the narrow beads of his squinting eyes. "I didn't handle any of the field tools," he mumbles into his ale. "I was only a child when we still had a farm to work."

"Still," you press, because seeing the proverbial Ferelden farmboy try to literally mow down a crowd of bandits never got _less_ alarming. "You swing like our enemies be only wheat fronds for the culling. We could have a tactical advantage if you'd only reserve a bit of that mayhem til its more opportune moment."

"Yes," the dwarf drawls, finding humor in the entire conversation, lazed back in his chair by the lull of the drink. "What's that Hawke said? The danger you bring down on that thick head of yours, that it distracts?" The dwarf chuckles, sitting forward only to pluck a grape from a plate, tossing it into the air to catch it behind his teeth.

"Distracts," the boy breathes, eyes wide now, voice gone to lament, "I only rush forward to plug up the wide-open vulnerabilities left while doing his - while the cast is - while he -" Carver slams his mug down, cursing under Andraste.

You exhale long and slow, muddling through the group tactics as had been under practice of late. "It's a strong swing," you try to amend. "It merely does not take into account the reservation necessary to, er, to swing again, fend off a blow or recover from -" you wave, having lost your point. It was a strong enough swing, and Carver only ever fell the once, and Hawke had been there to rouse him from the injuries besides. The fact that you are doting over cave-side dangers only highlights your attachment to the Hawke family, and by no fault of their earthy peasant brawling or its effectiveness.

"What," Isabela purrs from behind her ornate belt-knife. "Turn your stomach, Spiky, to see men felled as easily as long-grass? Didn't think Baby Blue over here had it in him, snuffing out lives as a bull snort against a field of candles?"

Your mouth twists down at Isabela's tactical re-arrangement of your concerns, and Carver goes a shade of red and has to blink a few times before dropping his gaze to the table. You can't say you'd admire that sort of thing, because you don't, but it's certainly not on your agenda to shame the lesser Hawke brother. You nearly wonder aloud what Isabela is playing at, then, but the question answers itself, for the provocation is met by her original target -

Garrett Hawke coughs into his forkful of dinner, glaring imperiously over at Isabela and her absurdity. The heat of him warms the entire left side of you, though your elbows hardly brush, and you needn't turn your chin to observe his reaction. "Who's the one keeping our flank clear of ambush? Who's the one putting the heat to Carver's blade so the twenty-odd raider fucks carve like butter under a hot knife?" Hawke nods across the table, and the matter is done with - for nobody might shame the lesser of the brothers but the greater brother himself. "He does his job, and I do mine. We did as much before helping any at this table, and will continue to do as much so long as you'll have our company."

Carver has already turned from his dinner and left the bench, for it hadn't been an hour since Hawke had passed similar scorn at Carver's recklessness - the compliment seemed bitter poison compared to the regular bickering the two engaged in over any of the other's choice or action. You can understand the boy's feeling of torture, for did your early guardians at once suppress your confidence while boasting your ability to their peers.

You make a note to hate the elder Hawke brother similarly - mages were often wont for compassion and honesty, even at those to whom they owed their safety. Carver returns composed, black hair damp from the wash he must have had at a basin, though his spirit remained silent and moody and he did entreat to you (or, your initial judgement) with worried glances.

* * *

The mage is dirty and haggard and there is a desperation in his eyes that speaks of dangerous strength. He is fastidious in his duties as a healer, but every word from his mouth points to an occupation of small-minded fury and determined revenge. You ache in the pit of your gut to recognize your own faults in his manner of thought, and cast a look to the day's company to gauge their confidence.

Carver looks downright disgusted - and more of him you've warmed to, for his honesty and his loyalty, however voluntary or no. He pulls his brother by the elbow, interrupting Hawke mid-chuckle at some droplet of flattery. Carver asks that you might all leave the suppressive air of that underground physicker, and you speak up to agree.

Hawke's eyes twinkle in warmth and he pulls his arm from Carver to wrap it about Carver's broad shoulders, chuffing him on the chest as if soothing an anxious hound at heel. "Come now, baby brother. We've a Warden here in front of us, and don't you remember the tales we used to hear of Wardens?"

The mage - Warden - frowns, but does not contradict the implication that he might be a persons worthy of such legend. You decide to hate him for the arrogance, and the greed with which he finally strikes his pact to help your - well, not _your_ family, but the family. The Hawkes. The mage might or might not prove to be a creature worthy of your spite, but right then Carver's eyes had gone wide and his jaw had unset, now open in a moue of consideration. You decide to follow his example and muster the courage to keep silent, to let Garrett decide the better help on his venture.

Carver follows you out from under the filth of Lowtown, watching as Hawke strides ahead whistling. "I don't like this," he mumbles between clenched teeth.

"You're too young to owe anyone prejudice," you hedge, attempting the sort of neutrality a persons free from the wrongs done against him might affect.

"I don't like that Warden," Carver clarifies. "I don't like his face. His voice is... ugh. I don't care if he's a mage or a political nut-case, I only just _don't like him_."

"What care you then; that his countenance was dirty, that he was poor and deranged?"

"No!" Carver drops his eyes as Hawke swings a look back to you with some concern darkening under thick eyebrows. Carver's mouth twists and he meets his brother's attention with vehemence - "I don't trust him. _We_ shouldn't trust him."

"I trust him," Hawke answers, as if remarking on the weather at no argument, as if the mage was the sun and no clouds marred him and that was plain for all to see who cared to look.

You scoff in disgust. A pang haunts your chest to see Carver's shoulders slump, to hear his long gait reduced to a scuff, to feel the warmth fade at your elbow as he lags behind, as if you had lost the affection of a hound at heel.

* * *

"I wonder if they're fucking..." Varric hems, gloved finger tapping his stubbled chin.

You cast a covert glance across the tavern, elbow-deep in a venison plate and too content on the recent win at cards to fall prey to your usual solemn humors. "Yes." That was your observation, at the ply of Isabela's dark thighs just beneath her belted jerkin, the way she walked when she was walking anywhere near Garrett Hawke.

Varric awards you with surprise. "Is that a guess, or an affirmation? I should wonder, Spiky, that you'd be so casual to say it either way."

Here you scowl. "Is fucking a thing you've ever treated with discretion? Why expect me any different toward the matter?"

"Great sodding gods below! You do know they're related, right?"

You swallow thick against a dry bit of venison suddenly stuck in your throat. "Cousins?" You hazard, now out of your depth.

"They share a mother!" Varric hisses. "You've met the woman! I'd say they share a father, too, but they look enough apart to -"

"Why," you intone evenly, "Would you wonder such a thing out loud." You can't even repeat it. Though inter-family marriages were often fashionable in Tevinter, you knew enough commoner's sense that said the practice was bizarre and absurd - dangerous or even harmful.

"Oh, look at the way Hawke _guards_ the man," Varric drawls, exasperated, pointing out one brother then the next, whose backs were turned as they attended ale at the barfront. "And there's enough weirdness between the two, an obvious monopolization one only ever sees in jealous husbands who beat their wives for being too pretty." The scorn is a new side of Varric Tethras you had not expected, but then you yourself had been surprising him all evening with your various insights, and perhaps he thought the exchange unbalanced until he might contribute his own dark surprises.

"Is... Carver pretty?" You hedge, feeling out a foothold in the absurd turn of conversation.

"Uglier than a nug's arse," Varric reassures. "But he has value. You can't say he doesn't have _value_."

And look you twice at the boy, who for all his insecurities and pettiness did wear the shoulders of a man and walk with the swinging gait of a taker of lives. Yes, Carver Hawke had value. Whether his swing were put to felling wheat or felling nobles seemed Garrett's alone to determine, and the realization of this puts an illness to your mouth that you no longer pursue your dinner.

"And Hawk," Varric continues, grim. "Hawke likes valuable things."

"What value, I wonder, are we to him?"

Varric laughs, loud and brusque. "Well if he hasn't tried to fuck you yet, I'd be amazed."

* * *

The year's conjecture folds into a darker suspicion, and grows. Varric amends his fiction with each new musing, as he does with many in your small community, and though the matter is set to the back of your thoughts as more pressing concerns come to light, still it lingers. Garrett Hawke was not a moral man, but he was still a man and had as many virtues as he did faults. When he bickered with Carver, all you could see was a rivalry of pride, even if the younger brother came away the more surly over his hurts.

And Carver Hawke, for all his bluster, showed jealousies that could have been as much against Hawke as for him - and you assume Varric were only drawing up the saucier comparison by dint of his natural creativity.

The evening when the rains came thundering in from the sea, the break of summer's stifling heat, you fucked Garrett Hawke against the wall of his own Foyer. You hated the man, but did not hate the turn of his neck or the rigid column of his cock; did not hate his flattery or his reckless passion; did not hate the moment of control you finally gained over a mage who professed to be desperately in love with you. Garrett Hawke admired your opposing view and respected your boundaries - though he was by no means a moral or selfless creature in the reflection of this sentiment.

You snuck out from the bedroom, sweaty and disheveled, carrying your armors in as quiet a bundle as possible so as not to wake your damnably handsome tormentor; to find Carver sitting up in front of the house's great hearthplace. You think perhaps he does not hear or see you creep barefoot toward the kitchen (to gain the back exit), but he sleepily requests you return to him with a plate of cheeses on the table therein, so that the two of you might talk a while.

Your stomach is in your knees, and you resent feeling as the magisters back home had so striven to make you feel - ashamed, weak to the ply of reward. But Carver by now is a dear friend and someone you consider under your protection, even if that means swallowing your pride and admitting a surrender to temptation.

The house is dark but for the embers in the hearth fire. You reappear with two bottles of vinter instead of the cheese plate, and curl cross-legged to the flagstones beside Carver, who is holding a bit of scarf once worn by his late mother.

"I'd rather you never return to this house," Carver starts, voice wavering, heavy jaw set forward, eyes scrubbed raw. "If that's okay."

There is a comfort in your discomfort, an old feeling, a nostalgia. There was a mage upstairs who held a cruel thrall over you and this person at your side echoed that, mimicking the sort of hesitation and in-fighting that came from a servant expected to love the master who neglected it. You take a breath.

"Is it that you hate the sight of me who would prefer your brother's bed over yours?" You guess, hopeful.

Carver's jaw quivers, sets, a muscle flickering in a face that had gone thinner over the year of strife.

The silence aches in the back of your teeth. You press the wine to Carver's chest, bumping his sternum until he takes the bottle in a loose cradle, eyes glassy in the firelight. "Do not hate others who carry the same weakness as you, for it is hypocrisy." You deliver the short lecture with a lean, boneless in your post-coital exhaustion, eerily at ease with the conversation. There were worse things than incest, and worse things than consenting to sleep with a mage. Neither you nor Carver was bruised or bloodied - merely offended, merely jealous.

Carver swallows, and you can hear the squelch of a tortured stomach from your position against him as he wrenches the wine cork free and drinks deep.

"So here we sit," you conclude, waxing poetic. "Dogs on the hearthstone, awaiting the footfall of our master, keen to meet the petting hand with a bite, keen to meet the beating hand with a lick."

Carver coughs against his guzzle, wiping his chin, laughter bitter. "That's why I ask that you leave, you stupid elf!"

"No," you answer, calm. Older. Wiser. "It is not. But I thank you for the prettiness of the lie."

"He doesn't love you," Carver entreats, voice suppressed to a furious rasp. "He doesn't love anybody unless they treat him like the tragic hero of his own vapid story."

"He loves you." You nod, patient. "Just as Danarius loved me; with a cruelty, a selfishness, a need for control. And I daresay, you'll have just as hard a time ever removing yourself from his side, because you - despite yourself -" and here your voice wavers, hot with anger, quiet in your shared discretion, "because you love him. Genuinely and unflinchingly, you would die for your magister. Every kind scrap he throws you is as precious as its own rarity makes it, and the cruelties are so often as to become routine. It would alarm you, to be treated kindly - and we see you meet Hawke's kind words with hatred that he would so deviate from your comfortable routine."

Carver has gone white in the face, listless, thumb busy circling the mouth of the wine bottle.

"What does he take from you, I wonder? The magister always takes something - is it your wages? Food?"

"Friends," Carver grits out between clenched teeth, shoulders tensing with each new breath. "Lovers. Family. People. He takes their affection the minute he suspects it might be mine to share, and he takes it wholly for himself and then dashes it to the ground as if it were a worthless thing."

"He does not take you to bed, then?" you are relieved to assume, but Carver's eyes grow wide and lost and he is not looking at you, but through you, eyebrows knit up in pain. You regret forcing the issue, regret loosening Carver's stolid countenance with the wine, but you do not regret the warm feeling of solidarity, of meeting another magister victim outside your homeland borders.

"He -" Carver starts, interrupted by a sharp inhale. "Not any more, no." Carver's gaze slides to the far end of the room, expression ajar as a door left open in a lazy wind, swaying from one state to the other. "It's not unusual," he recites, distant and rote. "In smaller families, secluded by travel, countryside towns... I was Bethany's first kiss, and she mine. Children do that, sometimes, before they know any better." Carver swings his head from side to side, a thoughtful denial. "Our father beat him near to death, after Bethany told - well, she was laughing about it - and he, Garrett, he was only old enough to have a feeling toward bodies and us never being in a place long enough he might make _friends_ -"

Carver takes another drink, this one resolute, words already growing thick like porridge left over the flame. "Father was a good man," Carver marvels at the memory, "Cuffed Bethany for repeating the gossip. Beat Garrett over his knee, last time in his life, and told him the wrongs of it. Mother was still at the old town, selling off our things, and -" Carver's mind wanders after the random, vivid details and the memory loses its original point. He grunts as if waking, blinking down at you with an apologetic grimace. "It's not so unusual, Fenris; and besides that he doesn't do it any more."

The comment slips out like a plate from off its tray, "And you hate him for it." Whether you meant to say Carver hated Garrett for the first offense, or for stopping his affection, is unclear.

But Carver nods, ready to admit, "Aye. I hate it more that he blamed me. Me! Just for being, what, alive and in front of him? For looking up to him, depending on him, _loving_ him? He's an evil man," Carver slurrs in the hissing rasp of their subdued discussion, "Always _has_ been, always _will_ be, no matter how he likes to pretty it up in front of others. Most days I don't know if I want to kill him, even as I'm defending him."

You nod, anchored by your sympathy. You knew well the longing to be touched, while loathing the act at the same time, the seed still tacky between your thighs and the musk and salt of your coupling still thick in the air around you. It is your suspicion that Carver might not have shared his story had you been any of Hawke's other lovers, for yours was a unique background of servitude and abuse that Carver knew by the intimate talks peppering your friendship.

"I fear the only escape I found from Danarius was at the hands of another magister," you lament in a quiet growl. "May that we find a third magister to do against Hawke what Hawke did against Danarius, and seek this third to be an ugly old woman that we not share her bed." You toast to the absurdity, and Carver's laugh is so stifled that it seems to pain him.

"I don't want him to die. I don't want to lose my family," Carver corrects, wiping at glistening eyes with the rough scrape of his thumb-heel.

"Danarius was the only family I knew, until I learned of a sibling - a sibling who betrayed me. The strength of blood and kinship can be a brittle thing, indeed."

"But it wasn't brittle on your end, was it?" Carver argues hotly, pressing closer in a turn, elbow draped over the seat of the couch. "Because you're a good person, at the root of you, and nothing will change that."

"What good the man who does the slaying at the whim of the evil?" You stand, begin to pace, restless now. You pause to unstopper your wine at long last, drinking shallow to whet your mouth against the dry the whispering brings to your throat. "We sit in the house of one who would, in Tevinter, find himself quite comfortable."

"Garrett doesn't believe in slavery," Carver argues plaintively, ushering you to the couch to quit your pacing. You sit in companionable silence, as close as any animal might huddle against unseen anxieties. You drink until you sleep, and wake only as the couch shifts from the weight leaving it.

Some hours later, you scamper to the door before the master of the house can descend from his bedchamber, adrift in the memory of your origins, frightened yet comforted, scornful yet longing, hating yet loving. It is no spell that holds you so rapturous in front of a powerful mage like Garrett - and you half wish it were so as not to so despise yourself for your weakness.

Carver beheld Garrett for the same reasons you had beheld Danarius - because nobody else had before visited such catastrophe _nor_ such affection on your persons. And Carver, being so disagreeable in his self-pity and ill humor, might never know another to visit his persons with affection, and you know this problem just as intimately.

You ache, as you walk. You ache in parts of yourself left unused since your time as a bodyguard, both in your sinews and in the core of you that once might have held your spirit.


End file.
